


Vulnerable

by ParticlesAndQuarks



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst ish, Character Analysis, Character Study, Gen, reid deserves better
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-21
Updated: 2021-01-21
Packaged: 2021-03-13 03:33:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28896699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ParticlesAndQuarks/pseuds/ParticlesAndQuarks
Summary: You’ve lost protectors before, haven’t you? Spencer Reid had lost so many protectors over the course of his life. That’s what made it so hard, history repeating itself.
Kudos: 13





	Vulnerable

**Author's Note:**

> Are all of my fics going to be about loss? ....I'm not sure yet.  
> Also, this isn't good lmao, i'm really tired but this idea has been rattling around in my head for a while so here we go!  
> Also also, I did not proofread this uhhhhh yeah

Spencer Reid had lost so many protectors, but he hadn’t truly realized it until she pointed it out to him. Sure, he’d had fleeting thoughts about the people he’d loved and lost, but he’d never realized how many he’d lost. He’d lost more protectors than there were words in the sentence that made him realize it. While all of them had their reasons for moving on, it didn’t mean it didn’t hurt. It didn’t mean he didn’t worry about who was going to be next. 

Spencer’s first time accepting the loss of a protector came when he was just ten years old. With no more than a letter with a bullshit explanation, his father left. He hadn’t known what to feel. He thought he should’ve been sadder than he was, but he wasn’t. He tried to make himself be sad, but he couldn’t. He wasn’t sad, but he noticed how things changed. He noticed how the people in the neighborhood looked at him differently now that he wasn't William Reid’s kid. No longer was he the son of the successful lawyer who was dedicated to his family despite the idiosyncrasies of his wife and son. They all saw him as the scrawny, weak son of Diana, the woman that had driven her husband away with her polluted mind. He didn’t realize that his father was his protector until years later when another protector vanished from his life.

Then, was his mom. She wasn’t really gone, he didn’t really lose her, but she’d taken on a different role in his life. He wasn’t sure when he really lost her as a protector. Maybe she never really was one. He’d taken care of himself for most of his childhood and he’d moved away to college when he was 12. It didn’t really hit him until he was 18 and he had to make some hard decisions. She wasn’t doing well on her own and he had the authority to get her some help, even though she didn’t want it. She didn’t want it, but it was what was best for her, right? He had to do what was best for her. He didn’t want to see her hurting anymore. He’d gotten her moved into a sanatorium. She hated it, for a really long time she hated it, until she settled in and started making friends. Being social. Then she didn’t hate it quite so much. Doesn’t mean it lessened his guilt. Didn’t mean that she wasn’t there to protect him anymore. He wasn’t the kid he used to be back in Las Vegas, but some days he wished he could curl up in her lap while she read him Chaucer and ran her fingers through his floppy brown hair. He missed when he could bury his head in the crook of her neck and smell the soft perfume she knew calmed him down. The protective shield she provided when things got too hard was gone.

He finally understood what he thought he should’ve felt when his dad left, when Gideon left. Jason Gideon, the man he’d looked up to for years, vanished just like his father. Left a note for him to read and use to explain to the people around him why everything became too much. Why leaving was the right move, the only right move. He was twenty-six years old yet he managed to feel reduced down to his ten-year-old self when he opened the envelope. He felt so vulnerable, so afraid. So lost. That’s when he understood what it felt like to lose a protector. One that protected you on purpose. One that made sure no one saw you as a little kid because you weren’t a little kid anymore. He found himself clinging to what little there was of Gideon left in his life. He kept their last chess game alive while he tried to grieve the loss of the relationship.

Spencer managed to live a few years of peace. Three and a half years of peace, actually. No one left, no one disappeared with only a note tucked away in a drawer, no one withered away until they were a shell of what he knew them as. Three and a half years. He should’ve seen it coming. The loss. He’d been happy for far too long, it should have been obvious that it would all come crashing down soon. And down crashing did it come, in the worst way. You see, the others were different. His father and surrogate father figure had left voluntarily and his mother, really she didn’t leave at all. Spencer could still hold out hope that one day Jason Gideon would walk back into the BAU. He could hope that a cure for schizophrenia could be found or at least a long term treatment option that worked. There was no hope in this case. There was no maladaptive daydream he could imagine to get himself through another week, another day, another hour. There were no possible scenarios that he could picture in order to leech a little bit of serotonin from his wretched life. This loss was like no other he’d experienced yet. In a matter of words, they were temporary losses that turned permanent. His next loss was a permanent one that turned temporary. Emily Prentiss was dead. 

Emily Prentiss was not dead. It was like whiplash, he didn’t even know if it counted as a true loss, but it mattered to him. She was alive and unwell in Paris. For seven months. But then she was back. She was back and he was mad, until he wasn’t. Part of the reason his anger dissipated so quickly was because he knew it was only a matter of time before he lost someone again. He needed to cherish what he had while he had it. So he made the most of the next year he got with Emily. The year solving cases and slowly seeing her get less and less content with the job, with the team, with her life. This was the first loss he saw coming. He knew it was over before it ended. That’s why he held her so close at JJ’s wedding, danced with her a little extra, spent a little more time talking to her at the bar than he had with anyone else. It didn’t make the loss hurt any less. It didn’t make the emptiness in his stomach go away when he saw her empty desk. Though it wasn’t empty for long.

His next loss...That one hurt the worst. Maeve Donavon was dead. Really, truly dead and she wasn’t coming back. For a while he thought he thought he might actually be able to help her, to shield her from her stalker. That would be the only adequate payback for the love and kindness she shared with him. Through weekly phone calls, the pair fell in love. He’d never been in love before, not like that. Not the same way as how he loved Maeve. He loved her like….He loved her like Hotch loved Haley. Despite all the bad, despite all the possible problems, he was dedicated to her. She was the only one in his eyes, even though he hadn’t seen her. Not until it was too late anyways. He finally got to see her minutes before the actual loss happened. It all happened in an instant and a lifetime all in the same. The gun was leveled near her head, the only thing between it being Diane’s. Diane may have been hard-headed but her skull wasn’t thick enough to shield Maeve from the oncoming bullet. The bullet went in one side and out the other, ripping away Reid’s happiness for the last ten months. Not only was Maeve gone, but he lost himself in the grief. For nearly four months he was a shell of a human being, less than that. He was the shell of a shell of a human being. He didn’t remember most of his days, they just went on without him. 

Eventually he was able to regain consciousness in the world and he slowly shifted to just being a shell of a person. Then, he was finally a person again. The next loss, he also saw coming. While it wasn’t easy to lose anyone, it was nowhere near as terrible as his last loss. When he lost SSA Alex Blake in his life, he was sad of course. She was just another person on the list of people to come and go from his life. For a long time he couldn’t decide if she was his protector or if he was hers. Truthfully, they were each other’s. She helped him get over Maeve and for a while, he helped her son live again. But eventually it became too much for her as well. He couldn’t fault her, he couldn’t fault any of them really, for leaving. The BAU was a lot to handle and burnout wasn’t something they were immune to. He’d considered leaving but...what else would he do? Where would he go? Maybe to Harvard to teach with Blake. Maybe just to visit. He missed her a lot of the time. She always seemed to understand him in a way that others didn’t. He liked that about her and he missed that presence on the team. 

It wasn’t even a whole year until his next loss came around. It was barely six months after SSA Alex Blake had returned to being only Professor Blake when former SSA Jason Gideon and co-founder of the Behavioral Analysis Unit became Jason Gideon (1955-2015). Reid felt like he’d been hit by a truck. No longer could he imagine the day (the day that wouldn’t have come regardless) that Jason Gideon walked back into the BAU, his glasses low on his nose as he read through his files. The maladaptive daydreams became a thing of the past and picking out a suit for the funeral became a thing of the present. Crumpled tissues littered the pockets of nearly all his clothes. He knew the day would come when Gideon coming back, even just for a visit, would no longer be a possibility. That knowledge didn’t soothe him. Just like he had seven years ago, Reid tried to keep Gideon’s last game of chess alive as he grieved the utter and true loss of Jason Gideon. 

The next loss was one he never expected. It hit him harder than he’d expected. It took every fiber of his being, every bit of energy he had, to not burst out crying when Derek Morgan slid the shiny card into his hand. The image of a baby boy stared up at him, along with the bold black text to announce his name. Hank Spencer Morgan. He appreciated the sentiment, he really did, but it didn’t quell the emptiness he could feel beginning to eat away at him. Derek Morgan was leaving the BAU to spend more time with his beautiful wife and adorable son. Spencer couldn’t have picked a better reason for someone to leave the BAU, but it still chipped away at him. It hurt even more to know that Morgan was there, still in the area, yet they rarely saw each other. He went from seeing Derek everyday to being lucky if he saw him more than twice a year. All of the losses had hurt, but Derek? That one hurt in a different way. 

Antonia Slade had been the one to point out how many protectors he’d lost. He’d never realized just how many people had come and gone. He hadn’t realized that for the last 6 years in a row, he’d lost someone that he saw as a protector. Emily Prentiss, Emily Prentiss again, Maeve Donovan, Alex Blake, Jason Gideon, and Derek Morgan. What made each loss so hard, was how history repeated itself. If you ignore history, it repeats itself. But just because you address it, because you know about the pattern, it doesn’t mean that it stops. It just made it feel different. 

That’s why losing Aaron Hotchner just weeks later felt different.


End file.
